Published by Mike Trudell on October 30, 20084:08 pm in Uncategorized.

With the tipoff of the NBA season two nights ago, fantasy hoops owners across the world began to look at box scores like Zach Morris looked at Kelly Kapowski.

Well, except those of us that thought our friends were taking care of setting up a last-minute draft time on ESPN.com … only to realize that all the good times were full. Accordingly, our Lakers staff league draft isn’t until after work on Thursday, while my college friends’ league won’t draft until Sunday morning. Crap. This stinks for a few reasons, but mainly because it blows the cover on certain sleepers that some of us were intent upon picking up in the late rounds that will now go one or two rounds earlier.

That said, my Lakers.com cohort Ty Nowell and I did “participate” in a NBA Team staffers eight-team league that was autodrafted on Monday. Prior to the draft, we were supposed to pre-rank our players, who were then selected automatically in snake order. So, I spent a good hour or so pre-ranking the top 200 players on my list, while Ty decided not to rank anybody (the league starts seven players, one at each position and two utility players). Here’s what happened after I drew the No. 3 pick and Ty the No. 5:

Round 1
Trudell: LeBron James (3)
Nowell: Chris Paul (5)

Round 2
Ty: Deron Williams (12)
Tru: Josh Smith (14)

Round 3
Tru: Al Jefferson (19)
Ty: Andre Iguodala (21)

Round 4
Ty: Rashard Lewis
Tru: Caron Butler

Round 5
Tru: Pau Gasol
Ty: Chris Bosh

Round 6
Ty: Antawn Jamison
Tru: Andrew Bynum

Round 7
Tru: Brandon Roy
Ty: Greg Oden**Ouch, why did ESPN have Oden ranked this high? That’s the first tough slap in the face to Ty for not setting his rankings.

Round 8
Ty: Gerald Wallace
Tru: Corey Maggette**Feeling very fortunate to get Maggette, the focus of a run-and-gun Warriors offense, in the eighth round. But rounds 10 to 15 are where I think I started to make some money.

Round 9
Tru: David Lee
Ty: Stephen Jackson

Round 10
Ty: Shane Battier
Tru: Richard Jefferson

Round 11
Tru: LaMarcus Aldridge
Ty: Andrew Bogut

Round 12
Ty: T.J. Ford
Tru: Tracy McGrady

Round 13
Tru: Randy Foye
Ty: Kevin Love

Round 14
Ty: Jameer Nelson
Tru: Charlie Villanueva

Round 15
Tru: Tyrus Thomas
Ty: Grant Hill

So, in an eight-team league, there’s no excuse not to have a very good, very deep team, and while our collective talent is quite good, one thing we could both noticed immediately is his lack of size and my lack of point guards. Translation: time to trade. Accordingly, I crafted up a Caron Butler and Andrew Bynum for Deron Williams and Rashard Lewis deal.

Anyways, Ty and I will start doing weekly fantasy podcasts shortly. I’ll have more info on that as soon as all of our teams are drafted.

For starters, we’ll discuss the best and worst performances of the week, the pickups and drops of the week, as well as several facetious ancillary awards (worst hair, most likely to star in a soap opera, whatever). Talk to you soon…